Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
here are economies like China's economy where it's less than a tenth [of a percent] today, although it is growing, is quite small, because of the notion that the government takes care of everything, and Europe and China, philanthropy has not been nearly of the same scale.
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young. I get very concerned when people talk about cutting education budgets.
If success corrupts, I'm probably pretty corrupted by now.
I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.
Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're Making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.
The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.
It's paradoxical that, when you have better health, families choose to have less children, because they've been having enough children so that they can be sure that a few of them will survive and take care of them. So as health improves, then all the other problems are dramatically easier to tackle.
There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.
I don't believe in creating dynastic wealth. I don't really believe that in a society that aspires to be meritocratic and that believes in equality of opportunity - my kids have had advantage over 99 percent of the kids in the country...
Test scores aren't perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense.
Solutions to all biological problems are greatly advanced by the sequencing work and the new tools that are created.
My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.
I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.
I believe technology will continue to become more affordable and more people will have the chance to use it. This will help more people get medical care and a good education.